Interesting interview with John Butler over the future and eventual re-monetization of Gold. Butler claims there is a massive financial earthquake to come with paper currencies are repudiated. 2008 was only a fore-shock.

The German Bundesbank under the Constitution can go to court if it feels the German currency (i.e euro) is under threat from the ECB. In that case the markets would immediately react negatively and the “shit would hit the fan”. In other words, the future of the euro may well be in the German Bundesbank’s hands.

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The Bank of Finland has announced that over 50% of the countries Gold reserves are held in London. Finland joins a long list of Western countries whose Gold reserves are stored at either New York, London or both. This leads credibility to the claim that Central Banks have been leasing and loaning out its Gold reserves to help surpress gold prices.

The Bank of Finland’s reserves include 49.035 tonnes of gold, valued at a market price of EUR 1,559 million as at 25 October 2013.

The Bank has confirmed the current arrangements for storing the gold held in its reserves. Having received the agreement of the central banks involved, it has decided to publish this information. The gold is stored on a geographically decentralised basis at a number of central banks: 51% is in the United Kingdom (Bank of England), 20% in Sweden (Sveriges Riksbank), 18% in the United States (Federal Reserve Bank of New York), 7% in Switzerland (Schweizerische Nationalbank) and 4% in Finland (Bank of Finland).

Gold price may be dropping but the demand for physical gold in the East is unprecedented. James Turk reckons 500 tons are being shipped each month. So much so, transportation is struggling to keep up with the demand. Turk discusses some of the reasons behind the takedown other than the obvious.

“We have recently seen one of the greatest interventions in the history of the gold market by Western central banks. Gold is one of the world’s least transparent markets, and misleading central bank accounting keeps it that way. But sometimes, by looking at different pieces of the puzzle, a picture starts emerging. So I have put together some of the pieces together….

“For example, there have been bottlenecks in moving metal, which is clearly flowing from West to East. Supply from mining in the West, excluding Russia and China which do not export their production, is about 160 tons per month. In addition, there may be another 50-to-80 tons per month of gold already in the above ground stock which moves around as a result of normal flows among countries and changing demand for different gold products.

But I estimate that recently over 500 tons per month have been moving around. This has had the effect of creating some transportation bottlenecks. The transport providers have not been able to cope with this remarkable development. Similarly, the refiners have not been able to cope with the historic level of demand by fabricating the metal needed to meet the frantic buying, even though they are operating 24/7. So we have to ask ourselves, where is all this metal coming from?

We are talking here about physical metal, Eric, and not just selling paper-gold with futures and other derivatives. The reality is that there has simply been too much metal moving from West to East — far beyond what has been dishoarded from ETFs and other visible sources like the Comex vaults. Much of this physical metal had to come from central bank vaults. That point is clear. But an important question still remains unanswered.

Even though Western central banks killed the gold price during the last couple of months with their dishoarding, we do not yet know precisely why they killed the gold price. What did the central planners want to accomplish by dishoarding so much metal in such a short period of time?

Of course we know the obvious reasons, like trying to keep people in national currencies, and the various risks these currencies involve, particularly the risk of keeping money on deposit in banks. Reasons such as these have been in play for more than a decade as the central planners have attempted to hold together a financial system that is no longer sustainable because of insolvent banks, unmanageable levels of debt and governments that cannot control their spending. These reasons have been well documented by the various analysts whose work has been published at places such as GATA and King World News.

But we have never before seen such a massive amount of dishoarding from central banks in such a short period of time. Given that the central bankers all recognize the importance of gold as a key monetary asset on their balance sheet and one they only sell gold reluctantly, why did they do it? Why the selling frenzy? And why right now?

Here is one possibility: It was to provide liquidity to ailing banks in Italy, or perhaps Spain. This is difficult to prove because central banks still do not prepare their accounts according to generally accepted accounting principles. But look at it this way, every 100 tons of gold is $4 billion of liquidity. So if central banks sold 500 tons, and I think at least this much was dishoarded by them recently, it is $20 billion, which is enough to provide a big lifeline to some insolvent banks.

It works like this. The banks borrow gold from the central bank, which they then sell for dollars/euros. The transaction is hidden from view because of central bank accounting, and the gold debt on the borrowing bank’s balance sheet is hidden among its total liabilities. The added benefit is that its gold liability diminishes as the gold price falls, making the bank appear even more solvent. Of course the bad assets remain, so this scheme is just a fig leaf for the insolvent banks to buy time.

However, there is an irony here for holders of gold: The dishoarding by central banks has caused the gold price to drop precipitously, but the central bank’s use of gold makes clear gold’s greatest attribute, which is the exceptional liquidity gold provides. Gold is money, and in this case it is rainy-day money in the sense that if I am right about how it is being used here, it is giving insolvent banks a lifeline.

The net result is that gold continues to flow from the West to the East where it is more highly valued. But even if desperate Western central banks are dishoarding gold in order to bail-out insolvent commercial banks, don’t take your eye off the ball. Keep accumulating physical gold and silver because they have always stood the test of time as the world’s only true money. All of these schemes by Western central planners will ultimately fail and the current financial system will end in disaster. As the system implodes, one of the only things left standing will be physical gold and silver.”

Two years after opening, the Hong Kong Mercantile Exchange (HKMEX) is to cease trading on Monday and close out all open positions. Clearly physical gold will not be delivered and the the question to ask is will the LBMA or COMEX be shortly behind it.

When the Rothchild’s HKMEx was launched in 2011, much of the metals community assumed that the COMEX & LBMA, were they not to outright default, would fade into irrelevance with the advent of the new Asian metals exchange. Two years to the day after the exchange’s launch however, in perhaps the most glaring evidence of physical gold & silver shortage to date, the HKMEx has announced it will voluntarily cease trading, and all open positions will be closed out and financially (cash) settled on Monday 5/20!

…….

We suspect that come Monday morning, more than one Chinese investor who believed he owned a gold position (and learns that in fact he held paper) will immediately attempt to source and take delivery of physical metal. As the Shanghai Gold Exchange appears to have stopped delivering gold as well, we suspect that the LBMA may be in for a bit of a physical run.

The first domino appears to have fallen in the ponzi fractional gold system.

Many people have claimed that the worlds reserve currency, the US Dollar will eventually cease to provide that role only to be replaced by a basket of currencies or one backed by gold. Karen Hudes, World Bank whistleblowe,r has confirmed that paper currency will be underpinned by precious metals.

I had the opportunity yesterday to speak with one of the western world’s most courageous and astute women, Karen Hudes, Former Senior Counsel to the World Bank—now turned whistle-blower. It was a powerful conversation, as Karen spent 20 years with the World Bank as an attorney and economist, before being “let-go” after reporting internal fraud and corruption. During the interview Karen indicated that the world is rapidly changing, with western power structures breaking down, economic & political influence gravitating to BRICs nations, all amid a pendingcurrency transition which will highly favor precious metals. Hudes stated: “All of the countries of the world are going to allow precious metals to serve as currency, and this will be an underpinning for paper currency, as we’ll have both systems at the same time.”

Starting out by discussing the shocking centralized power she witnessed while working at the World Bank, Karen explained that, “A study done by three [Swiss] systems analysts who used mathematical modeling [shows] how the [world’s] 43,000 transnational corporations were being controlled through interlocking corporate directorates. There’s a group of 147 companies, most of them are financial institutions, and what they’ve done, is through the interlocking directorates, they control 40% of the net worth of these [43k] companies, and 60% of their earnings…so that group has been using the presidency of the World Bank as kind of a puppet to dominate the world—that’s [now] finished.”

A major shock to that centralized power base, according to Karen, was the recent move by BRICs nations leaders to bypass the World Bank for their financing needs, by establishing their own development bank. “As the BRICs [nations] economic power grows,” she explained,“they’re not going to be strangled anymore through the grabbing [of] their resources…So their decision to start their own development bank was their way of letting [world] governments know…that its time to end this corruption.”

Major moves toward monetary independence are also being made by growing numbers of U.S. states, Karen added. She explained that, “The states are starting to have legislation recognizing gold and silver bullion as legal currency. This is [also] a very strong signal the states are sending to the federal government, that the time to get serious about ending the corruption in the financial system is now here.”

When asked her thoughts on what this all means for the world monetary system, Karen said, “What’s going to happen, is we’re going to have all the countries of the world, sit down and figure out what’s going to be the best, most orderly transition from the current system that we have, [which has] profound imbalance and unsustainable deficits…[this change] is going to happen as each country makes its preference known, because the system we have now is not transparent, and the biggest change [in the new system], is that there’s going to be transparency.”

That transparency may be found through a gold-backed currency system, Karen noted, as, “All of the countries of the world are going to allow precious metals to serve as currency, and this will be an underpinning for paper currency, [as] we’ll have both systems at the same time. This is my guess, as I mentioned—I am an economist.”

As a final comment speaking towards her difficult journey as a World Bank whistle-blower, Karen said, “I’ve been struggling now for years, to tell the American public what’s [been] going on. I haven’t gotten through, because this [financial] group has bought up the press and has been spreading disinformation systematically. That undermines the whole point of a democracy. How can voters vote without an informed opinion, without the information that they’re entitled too? So this strangle-hold on information is going to end in very short order.”

For further background on corruption in the World Bank check out the interview of whistleblower Karen Hudes.

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Arizona follows Utah’s lead by making gold and silver legal tender. More than a dozen states have considered similar moves in the last few years. This is a further kick in the stones for people’s faith in the US dollar since Central Bankers have gone full retard with the printing presses. At least now in Arizona there is an alternative that cannot be inflated so easily. Watch this space as more will undoubtedly follow.

PHOENIX (Reuters) – The Arizona Senate on Tuesday approved a measure to make gold and silver legal currency in the state, in a response to what backers said was a lack of confidence in the international monetary system.

The legislation cleared the Republican-controlled Senate by an 18-10 vote after being approved by the state House earlier this month. It now goes to Republican Governor Jan Brewer, who has not indicated if she will sign it into law or veto it.

The bill calls for Arizona to make gold and silver coins and bullion legal tender beginning in mid-2014, joining existing U.S. currency issued by the federal government.

If signed into law, Arizona would become the second state in the nation to establish these precious metals as legal tender. Utah approved such legislation in 2011.

More than a dozen states have considered similar legislation in recent years, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The use of gold and silver as currency would be strictly voluntary, with businesses left free to accept the precious metals as payment for goods and services as they choose.

State Senator Chester Crandell, a Republican and sponsor of the bill, said the ability to use gold and silver in everyday life in the state is still a “work in progress” and that more legislation was needed before it could be viable.

“This is the first step in getting it into the statute so we can build on it,” Crandell said at an earlier hearing on the bill.

But Democratic state Senator Steve Farley said the bill could create massive problems for businesses in the state and government officials trying to administer what would in effect be a dual monetary system.

“There’s no reason for us to do this,” Farley told lawmakers during the final vote on Tuesday. “This is another one of those things that gets national press for us – and not in a good way.”

He also pointed to the recent decline in the value of gold – which sank to $1,321.35 per ounce on April 16, its lowest price in more than two years – noting that “anybody who thinks gold or silver is a really safe place to put your money had better think again.”

The push to establish gold and silver as currency has become increasingly popular in the United States in recent years among some hardline fiscal conservatives, with the backing of groups including the Tea Party movement, American Principles Project and the Gold Standard Institute.

Keith Weiner, president of the Gold Standard Institute advocacy group and a supporter of the bill, said the legislation was needed to counter what he sees as insolvency in the global monetary system.

“The dollar system and all of the other derivative currencies, including the euro, are a recipe for worldwide bankruptcy,” Weiner told lawmakers at an earlier hearing, adding that a “sound and honest money system such as gold and silver” was needed to bring stability.

I think we are all beginning to draw the same conclusion as Matt Taibbi.

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world’s largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.

You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that’s trillion, with a “t”) worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it “dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets.”

That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world’s largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world’s largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.

Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It’s about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.

It should surprise no one that among the players implicated in this scheme to fix the prices of interest-rate swaps are the same megabanks – including Barclays, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and the Royal Bank of Scotland – that serve on the Libor panel that sets global interest rates. In fact, in recent years many of these banks have already paid multimillion-dollar settlements for anti-competitive manipulation of one form or another (in addition to Libor, some were caught up in an anti-competitive scheme, detailed in Rolling Stone last year, to rig municipal-debt service auctions). Though the jumble of financial acronyms sounds like gibberish to the layperson, the fact that there may now be price-fixing scandals involving both Libor and ISDAfix suggests a single, giant mushrooming conspiracy of collusion and price-fixing hovering under the ostensibly competitive veneer of Wall Street culture.

Why? Because Libor already affects the prices of interest-rate swaps, making this a manipulation-on-manipulation situation. If the allegations prove to be right, that will mean that swap customers have been paying for two different layers of price-fixing corruption. If you can imagine paying 20 bucks for a crappy PB&J because some evil cabal of agribusiness companies colluded to fix the prices of both peanuts and peanut butter, you come close to grasping the lunacy of financial markets where both interest rates and interest-rate swaps are being manipulated at the same time, often by the same banks.

“It’s a double conspiracy,” says an amazed Michael Greenberger, a former director of the trading and markets division at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and now a professor at the University of Maryland. “It’s the height of criminality.”

Even the courts came down on the side of the market riggers, saying it was your fault if you were a victim. Thats like telling someone who got mugged “well you shouldn’t have had money in your pocket in the first place”.

The bad news didn’t stop with swaps and interest rates. In March, it also came out that two regulators – the CFTC here in the U.S. and the Madrid-based International Organization of Securities Commissions – were spurred by the Libor revelations to investigate the possibility of collusive manipulation of gold and silver prices. “Given the clubby manipulation efforts we saw in Libor benchmarks, I assume other benchmarks – many other benchmarks – are legit areas of inquiry,” CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton said.

But the biggest shock came out of a federal courtroom at the end of March – though if you follow these matters closely, it may not have been so shocking at all – when a landmark class-action civil lawsuit against the banks for Libor-related offenses was dismissed. In that case, a federal judge accepted the banker-defendants’ incredible argument: If cities and towns and other investors lost money because of Libor manipulation, that was their own fault for ever thinking the banks were competing in the first place.

“A farce,” was one antitrust lawyer’s response to the eyebrow-raising dismissal.

“Incredible,” says Sylvia Sokol, an attorney for Constantine Cannon, a firm that specializes in antitrust cases.

All of these stories collectively pointed to the same thing: These banks, which already possess enormous power just by virtue of their financial holdings – in the United States, the top six banks, many of them the same names you see on the Libor and ISDAfix panels, own assets equivalent to 60 percent of the nation’s GDP – are beginning to realize the awesome possibilities for increased profit and political might that would come with colluding instead of competing. Moreover, it’s increasingly clear that both the criminal justice system and the civil courts may be impotent to stop them, even when they do get caught working together to game the system.

If true, that would leave us living in an era of undisguised, real-world conspiracy, in which the prices of currencies, commodities like gold and silver, even interest rates and the value of money itself, can be and may already have been dictated from above. And those who are doing it can get away with it. Forget the Illuminati – this is the real thing, and it’s no secret. You can stare right at it, anytime you want.

We have given the bankers the opportunity to set markets based on their own data.

The banks found a loophole, a basic flaw in the machine. Across the financial system, there are places where prices or official indices are set based upon unverified data sent in by private banks and financial companies. In other words, we gave the players with incentives to game the system institutional roles in the economic infrastructure.

Libor, which measures the prices banks charge one another to borrow money, is a perfect example, not only of this basic flaw in the price-setting system but of the weakness in the regulatory framework supposedly policing it. Couple a voluntary reporting scheme with too-big-to-fail status and a revolving-door legal system, and what you get is unstoppable corruption.

Every morning, 18 of the world’s biggest banks submit data to an office in London about how much they believe they would have to pay to borrow from other banks. The 18 banks together are called the “Libor panel,” and when all of these data from all 18 panelist banks are collected, the numbers are averaged out. What emerges, every morning at 11:30 London time, are the daily Libor figures.

Banks submit numbers about borrowing in 10 different currencies across 15 different time periods, e.g., loans as short as one day and as long as one year. This mountain of bank-submitted data is used every day to create benchmark rates that affect the prices of everything from credit cards to mortgages to currencies to commercial loans (both short- and long-term) to swaps.

The Libor rigging was staggering and the fines when dished out were minor.

Hundreds of similar exchanges were uncovered when regulators like Britain’s Financial Services Authority and the U.S. Justice Department started burrowing into the befouled entrails of Libor. The documentary evidence of anti-competitive manipulation they found was so overwhelming that, to read it, one almost becomes embarrassed for the banks. “It’s just amazing how Libor fixing can make you that much money,” chirped one yen trader. “Pure manipulation going on,” wrote another.

………….

Michael Hausfeld of Hausfeld LLP, one of the lead lawyers for the plaintiffs in this Libor suit, declined to comment specifically on the dismissal. But he did talk about the significance of the Libor case and other manipulation cases now in the pipeline.

“It’s now evident that there is a ubiquitous culture among the banks to collude and cheat their customers as many times as they can in as many forms as they can conceive,” he said. “And that’s not just surmising. This is just based upon what they’ve been caught at.”

Greenberger says the lack of serious consequences for the Libor scandal has only made other kinds of manipulation more inevitable. “There’s no therapy like sending those who are used to wearing Gucci shoes to jail,” he says. “But when the attorney general says, ‘I don’t want to indict people,’ it’s the Wild West. There’s no law.”

After Libor rigging, a new market manipulation is coming to light, interest rate swaps.

The problem is, a number of markets feature the same infrastructural weakness that failed in the Libor mess. In the case of interest-rate swaps and the ISDAfix benchmark, the system is very similar to Libor, although the investigation into these markets reportedly focuses on some different types of improprieties.

Though interest-rate swaps are not widely understood outside the finance world, the root concept actually isn’t that hard. If you can imagine taking out a variable-rate mortgage and then paying a bank to make your loan payments fixed, you’ve got the basic idea of an interest-rate swap.

In practice, it might be a country like Greece or a regional government like Jefferson County, Alabama, that borrows money at a variable rate of interest, then later goes to a bank to “swap” that loan to a more predictable fixed rate. In its simplest form, the customer in a swap deal is usually paying a premium for the safety and security of fixed interest rates, while the firm selling the swap is usually betting that it knows more about future movements in interest rates than its customers.

Prices for interest-rate swaps are often based on ISDAfix, which, like Libor, is yet another of these privately calculated benchmarks. ISDAfix’s U.S. dollar rates are published every day, at 11:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m., after a gang of the same usual-suspect megabanks (Bank of America, RBS, Deutsche, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, etc.) submits information about bids and offers for swaps.

……….

The idea that prices in a $379 trillion market could be dependent on a desk of about 20 guys in New Jersey should tell you a lot about the absurdity of our financial infrastructure. The whole thing, in fact, has a darkly comic element to it. “It’s almost hilarious in the irony,” says David Frenk, director of research for Better Markets, a financial-reform advocacy group, “that they called it ISDAfix.”

So what about other market manipulation?

After scandals involving libor and, perhaps, ISDAfix, the question that should have everyone freaked out is this: What other markets out there carry the same potential for manipulation? The answer to that question is far from reassuring, because the potential is almost everywhere. From gold to gas to swaps to interest rates, prices all over the world are dependent upon little private cabals of cigar-chomping insiders we’re forced to trust.

“In all the over-the-counter markets, you don’t really have pricing except by a bunch of guys getting together,” Masters notes glumly.

That includes the markets for gold (where prices are set by five banks in a Libor-ish teleconferencing process that, ironically, was created in part by N M Rothschild & Sons) and silver (whose price is set by just three banks), as well as benchmark rates in numerous other commodities – jet fuel, diesel, electric power, coal, you name it. The problem in each of these markets is the same: We all have to rely upon the honesty of companies like Barclays (already caught and fined $453 million for rigging Libor) or JPMorgan Chase (paid a $228 million settlement for rigging municipal-bond auctions) or UBS (fined a collective $1.66 billion for both muni-bond rigging and Libor manipulation) to faithfully report the real prices of things like interest rates, swaps, currencies and commodities.

All of these benchmarks based on voluntary reporting are now being looked at by regulators around the world, and God knows what they’ll find. The European Federation of Financial Services Users wrote in an official EU survey last summer that all of these systems are ripe targets for manipulation. “In general,” it wrote, “those markets which are based on non-attested, voluntary submission of data from agents whose benefits depend on such benchmarks are especially vulnerable of market abuse and distortion.”

Translation: When prices are set by companies that can profit by manipulating them, we’re fucked.

“You name it,” says Frenk. “Any of these benchmarks is a possibility for corruption.”

The only reason this problem has not received the attention it deserves is because the scale of it is so enormous that ordinary people simply cannot see it. It’s not just stealing by reaching a hand into your pocket and taking out money, but stealing in which banks can hit a few keystrokes and magically make whatever’s in your pocket worth less. This is corruption at the molecular level of the economy, Space Age stealing – and it’s only just coming into view.